The meeting has just started when the phone rings. Marie-Thérèse Gérard, 63, hesitates before picking up. “That’s it, that’s the job of a rural mayor: I do everything! »then lets go of the elected official of Saint-Martin-de-Salencey (Saône-et-Loire), 115 inhabitants, that we call her “because there is no more water, because there are cows on the road, leaks in the church or weeds in the cemetery…”.
These difficulties should be on the menu of the congress of mayors, which is being held in Paris from November 20 to 23: it is increasingly difficult to be mayor in France, according to the survey carried out by the Sciences Po Political Research Center (Cevipof) for the Association of Mayors of France (AMF) and the ministry responsible for local authorities, including The world delivers the results. Sent to 33,322 mayors, completed online between September 19 and October 12, the representative survey of French municipalities received 5,980 complete responses (7,992 with partial forms).
“Without us being able (yet) to speak of a crisis of vocation, there is a form of disenchantment around the role of mayor”writes Martial Foucault, director of Cevipof. “Revealing republican fatigue”, resignations are accelerating: 350 per year during the previous mandate; 450 per year since 2020. Beyond the highly publicized attacks on elected officials from Saint-Brevin-les-Pins (Loire-Atlantique), in May, or from L’Haÿ-les-Roses (Val-de-Marne), in July, this fatigue is often linked to the conditions of exercise of the mandate, according to the study: difficult reconciliation of the function with personal (12%) or professional (10%), insufficient compensation (7%), lack of training or information (6%).
“It’s a tabooregrets Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, socialist mayor of Rouen. We refuse to see that there are fewer and fewer people who want to get involved. » If local democratic life is destabilized, Cevipof nevertheless puts the urgency of the subject into perspective: France still has a million candidates on the lists during the municipal elections, for 47 million voters. “The highest ratio in the world”underlines Martial Foucault.
“The load is heavy”
The mayors’ unease is no less palpable. “I would like us to recognize the time we spend thereconfides Marie-Thérèse Gérard. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t work for the town hall, Sunday included. » Weeks to “fifty, seventy hours”, they affirm in unison. The Cevipof survey once again allows for nuance: declared working time is on average thirty-two hours per week. But 40.1% of city councilors claim to carry out a parallel activity. Most benefit from “time ease”, but for 62.2% of them, this is not enough.
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